A Survey On Language Use In Commercial Places In Yueyang City

With the rapid development of social and economic aspects in our country, people from different regions begin to contact and communicate with each other more and more frequently.At the same time, the phenomenon of Putonghua and local dialect are coexisting with each other in different regions becomes more and more prominently. Besides speaking local dialect,people in Yueyang city also use Putonghua more and more frequently when communicating with each other in their daily life.This research investigates the language use situation of salespersons in commercial places in Yueyang city from the following two aspects: 1)Which language salespersons in commercial places will choose to communicate with their customers? 2)How is salesperson’s language choice related to some social factors like age, gender, educational level and the level of communication places?Under the instruction of Speech Accommodation Theory, the researcher selects three different levels of commercial places in Yueyang city as the research place, and chooses 95 salespersons working in these places as the research subjects. The researcher finally collects the required data with the method of participant observation and non-participant observation and recording. With the help of some software like GOLDVARBX and WPS Excel, the researcher has processed the data and analyzed it in a statistic way.The results show that Putonghua and Yueyang dialect are two main languages used by the salespersons in commercial places in Yueyang city, and the percentage of the use of Putonghua is much higher than the percentage of the use of Yueyang dialect in general. The level of the commercial places, the salesperson’s age and educational level are the prominent factors that affect the salesperson’s language choice. The language choices of salespersons from different levels of commercial places are varying. The higher the level of commercial places, the more frequently the salespersons choose Putonghua to communicate with the customers, the less frequently the use of Yueyang dialect. And the salesperson’s educational level and age are also statistical significant to the salesperson’s language choice. The higherthe salesperson’s educational level and the younger the salesperson is, the more frequently the salespersons choose Putonghua to communicate with the customers. In overall, more than half of the salespersons will switch their languages from one to another when communicating with the customers. And the motivations of their code-switching include the marketing purposes, convenience, change of emotional distance and emphasis.As the society and economy are developing rapidly, speaking Putonghua is a guarantee of successful communication between people from different regions. Thus, it is very necessary to promote Putonghua among the salespersons in commercial places in Yueyang city. And protecting local dialect is also very important when promoting the use of Putonghua.